It is also wants to better manage the financing and support of Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform, and other applications Rackspace supports through new support and service options that allow customers to start small and upgrade to premium support levels.

While Rackspace is generally associated with cloud management capabilities and its "Fanatical Support," it also has specialized expertise in architecting and managing digital applications like e-commerce and web content platforms.

Rackspace Digital is a two-year-old division of Rackspace, a San Antonio, Texas-based managed cloud vendor that offers infrastructure, as well as architecture expertise, tools and applications to help enterprises manage their cloud deployments.

Magento Management

As e-commerce sites become increasingly important, so does management of those sites.

“The digital practice within Rackspace is investing across the software platforms we support and bringing offerings to market based on customer and partner feedback. Our investments in Magento are based on that kind of feedback,” Brant Jones, director of product for Rackspace Digital, told CMSWire. He said customers asked for this "to take advantage of cloud economics, scalability and performance" and because architecting and operating an optimal Magento architecture 24/7, 365 days a year is "complex and difficult.”

The Magento support is designed for companies without in-house staff as well as users with in-house teams that are looking for a safety net they can use when questions and issues exceed their expertise.

Rackspace Evolution

Managed Environments for Magento is part of the continued evolution of Rackspace’s managed cloud offerings. It's designed for enterprises that want to accelerate time to market and aid smaller companies that would normally find this kind of offering too expensive.

“Rackspace’s application services have traditionally been targeted at the enterprise market and priced accordingly. However, customers who are not large enterprises have a need and desire for application support as well,” Jones said.

“These customers are less likely to have in-house staff that can be dedicated to supporting their production platforms and applications, as their IT staff is usually tasked with production support, as well as developing the next application or modifications needed to support the business.”

Over the coming months, Jones said Rackspace Digital will build out Managed Environments for Magento with the introduction of Managed Cloud for Magento. That offering will deliver the same optimized, customizable, high-performance Magento environments on AWS, but will do so using a software application.

“We'll deliver a Managed Cloud offer that allows customers to deploy an optimized, high performance e-commerce site on Amazon Web Services and do that themselves in about the time it takes to order a pizza,” Jones added.

“Those sites will be built on curated architectures designed by Magento experts from Rackspace so that customers will no longer have to wait days or weeks to get started with Magento due to the complexities of the Magento infrastructure architecture."